natural language, the gap between us, and consciousness as a spotlight

[gusl]

My view of natural language: there is a huge communicative gap between any two human beings: our thoughts need to be serialized in order to fit through the information bottleneck that are our communicative channels. This channel is 1D, slow and noisy. Things are not so bad, because one can usually (but not reliably) convey the concepts that one is thinking of, given enough time and a collaborative communication partner. But we can and should overcome these limits.

Consciousness is a spotlight. So is speech. I can give you (or myself) a tour of the structures in my mind (associations, explanations, complex theories^{1 2}) by means of a narrative. But wouldn't it be great to do it in parallel, as happens in "The Matrix"³? This communicative limitation of ours is analogous to having PCs that can only copy CDs the way VCRs used to copy VHS tapes: by playing the whole thing.⁴

I have a lot of concepts and background knowledge in common with the rest of humanity, but unless they speak one of a handful of languages, we will not be able to communicate. It's like trying to look something up in a book where the index is gibberish.

But even when two people speak the same language, they are restricted to using words and constructs that are available in their common languages. More fundamentally, this 1D channel doesn't allow one to convey associations and feelings that appear briefly in one's consciousness (thought is faster than speech), although filmmakers sometimes do a pretty good (if extremely expensive) job of it.

But why does the text medium copy the auditory medium? Legacy. Text has the potential to be much more. I believe that we now have the potential of inventing visual languages that provide much more natural representations of our thoughts, for the sake of better human-human interaction.

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<sup>1- someone once said that finishing a complex mathematical proof is like arriving at the end of long and winding road: even if you can retrieve each step as requested, you can't see it all at once.

2- as represented by argument maps.

3- To be nitpicky, Neo's auto-lessons taught him procedural, not declarative knowledge.

4- this analog analogy also models the introduction of noise. This is also analogous to the way that revisited memories get distorted.</sup>

Comments

[smandal.livejournal.com]

* I find semantic aphasia in psychopaths and people with brain injuries to be fascinating. By never having/losing the common experience and empathic sense their language becomes strained and mechanical -- difficult for others to fully comprehend.

* Don't you see written language deviating from the spoken word, as written informal communication (such as this) becomes increasingly commonplace?

[rdore.livejournal.com]

You might find this an interesting read.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Yes it is. Thanks.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Re footnote 3, he did at least acquire one piece of declarative (reflective) knowledge, i.e. "I know kung fu" :)

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

A more serious comment: I do agree that our notion of text can be more interesting than a homomorphically 1d stream of words. In a way we've already achieved this, just by pulling the usual academic extension of "text" to movies, tv, comics, software, whatever.

The hard thing is that the process of reading something still has a rather narrow bottleneck, our eyes and attention.